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SPAM SPAM SPAM!

Hey all. My site has recently been inundated by endless spam messages. And by endless, I mean upwards of 5ooo messages a day.I have a personally crafted spam filter that grabbed lots of them, but recently I’ve been running into spam that has crept past that filter, and it’s been … annoying. Like, I’ve needed to devote hours to combing through the spam to see if there’s any real messages in there.

To deal with this, I’ve been tightening my filter. I just wanted to notify people, in case you write a message and it doesn’t actually post to the site. It doesn’t mean that I hate you, or that you posted something unacceptable. It just means that you used a word or phrase that triggered my increasingly touchy spam filter.

In particular, most of the spam coming my way now has to do with medicine and the medical community (specifically the obtaining of medicine through somewhat nefarious online means) and so my filter’s been set to boot almost all messages that refer to anything medicine-related. There may be some casualties due to this – real comments filtered out erroneously – but I had to err on the side of more filtering. Sorry.

It’s either apply a heavy filter or make everyone do one of those ‘I am not a robot’ tests every time they post, and that’s no fun for anyone.

I’ve tried to avoid blocking regular words that anyone might possibly use, but I did have to make some exceptions. Particularly the word describing a medicine store that rhymes with ‘larmacy’. I just couldn’t avoid blocking it. It was contained in 95% of the spam I was getting.

I want to keep things as simple as possible for people. I like the idea of people just typing a comment and letting it fly. More steps, I think, dissuade from the ease of commenting. So anything I can do on the back end to stop the spam but allow the comments is good by me.

The new filter is mostly working, though. In the past three hours, it has successfully filtered out 1,508 spam comments. I’m proud of my craftsmanship.

Not sure how they do that (some fancy plugin, most likely), but it’s possible. There are lots of various tools I could use to totally eliminate spam, but they all provide some sort of barrier. I’d rather have people just able to type their message in and be done with it. I always like to keep accessibility open. And the spam filter is largely doing its job. Like today, I received upwards of 7000 spam messages. 33 got through. I can sort 33 by hand with little difficulty. It’s just harder when there’s thousands.

Handcrafted. Every time a message gets through, I parse it out and identify components I can filter. So it keeps getting more effective. Today it caught 10,000 spam messages and let 20 through. I hope to get it down to letting only one or two through.

A site I moderate is getting good results by blocking anything hosted by the Kyivstar network out of the (Russian-controlled part of) Ukraine. Hundreds and hundreds of attempts. Dunno if it works the same on WordPress, but trying blocking the hostname “*.broadband.kyivstar.net”

I’ve decided to bite the bullet and pay for Akismet, which is a professional anti-spam filter for WordPress. It costs money, but it works very well and saves me the trouble of poring through spam to figure out ways to block it. It seems to work well for me so far.